Decorating Dilemmas: Morgan’s New Living Room

Decorating Dilemmas is a weekly column in which our stylists answer your design questions, so you can tackle your home decorating project with complete confidence.

Hi there!

I am moving into a new house soon and will be taking my current furniture with me. The new living room will be much larger, and I really want to add two accent chairs to the space that will be durable for kids and pets (easily washed or cleaned from stains) and want the same thing out of a rug for the living room as well.

The dilemma I am having is finding fabrics, colors, and prints that coordinate with our existing dark brown leather furniture. I attached two photos of our current furniture (1 sofa + 1 large chair) and our media console table. We are open to any ideas as we are so stuck and want out new space to be beautiful! It’s a HUGE space at the new house for the living room.

The dimensions of the living room are 23′ L x 18’6.5″ W. Thanks so much for your help! I love blues – bright blues, navies, teals, etc. I also love neutrals, if that is helpful. Our fireplace will also be white painted wood with a black marble base instead of the stone one shown in the photos.

Congratulations on your new home! We’d love to help you expand your current living room furniture to accommodate the larger size of your new space. We’re including a general suggestion for furniture placement even though we didn’t have the dimensions of your current pieces. We guessed that your leather sofa was around the size of our Baldwin Sofa.

We’ll start by placing your leather sofa facing the fireplace and centered in the room. We think the media console that you’re currently using could be a great sofa table. Your leather chair could be placed at an angle to the left of the fireplace.

Now that we’ve found new homes for your current pieces, we’re ready to shop! The Emerson Chairs in Teal Microfiber and Brass Nail Heads, will not only add a punch of color but also be kid friendly. You’ll be able to fit two of these to the right of the fireplace. The Felix Nesting Tables will be a great landing place for drinks between the Emerson Chairs. Your room is so large that you can easily fit a 9×12 rug. Because you requested kid and pet friendly products we wanted to suggest an indoor/outdoor rug like our St. Tropez Indoor/Outdoor Sisal Rug bordered in Sunbrella Taupe. You will find that this rug is easy to keep clean and very comfortable to walk on with bare feet. The Andrews Coffee Table is one of our favorites for large living spaces. You’ll be able to have fun styling it with an assortment of coffee table books, or even with baskets underneath to hold kid toys. We’d like you to use the coordinating Andrews Pedestal Accent table to the left of your leather sofa. If you have an electrical outlet in the floor, this would be a great surface for a table lamp.

Moving on to the left wall we see the potential for a “wow” piece like our Casa Florentina Extended Antoinette Sideboard. These pieces have a unique hand rubbed finish, and are made in Italy. We think the distressed blue finish would be a nice way to tie in the teal/blue color of the Emerson Chairs. There’s room for a pair of our Nadine Table Lamps on either end of the sideboard. The sideboard could be adjacent storage for your entertaining supplies, and another place to serve from during the busy holiday season. Over the sideboard we’d love to see a mirror to reflect the light coming in from the windows on the opposite wall. We think placing two of our Sasha Mirrors side by side, would look absolutely stunning!

The beauty of this large room affords you the luxury of using it for more than one purpose. The right hand corner of the room could be a mini office using our Large Eastman Secretary. Our Gramercy chair would be a great option pulled up to the secretary as a desk chair.

Finally, to soften all of your windows we’d love to see you use our new Teigen Drapery Panels. The pattern of these drapes would bring a modern touch to your mostly traditional room, and we think that would be fabulous!

We enjoy spending days interacting with How to Decorate readers. From answering Design Dilemmas to writing How To articles and working with guest designers, our passion is to provide informative and accurate resources to help people solve their design problems.

June 14, 2017

June 7, 2017

2 Comments

Connie

Annika Dupree

June 12, 2017

Connie,
You make a good observation! It was not clearly stated or written out in the design plan from the interior designer. However, based on the picture of the new living space that was provided, I think the interior designer imagined the television to be mounted above the fireplace as shown in the picture. This would be why a media console wasn’t specifically chosen to address this issue. Thanks for reading and noticing this!